Gian Manik
11 February - 8 March, 2026
This online exhibition introduces the works of Australian painter Gian Manik (b. 1985) ahead of the artist undertaking a residency this summer at Domus Nostra in Rome.
Gian Manik (b. 1985) is an Australian painter living and working in Melbourne (AUS). His practice seeks to decolonise European and heteronormative art-historical narratives, complicating traditional binaries such as native and foreign, local and global, self and other. Drawing on his research into Orientalist and queer portrayal in both art history and popular culture – including fashion, music, and performance – Manik challenges entrenched racial, ethnic, and phobic hierarchies that often permeate society and traditional pictorial spaces.
Manik’s references span a wide range of imagery, from 19th-century Orientalist paintings to AI-generated images circulated on Instagram, which he combines with personal experience and historical narratives to construct an inclusive visual vocabulary that deliberately disrupts established hierarchies of value and authorship.
The suite of paintings presented in this online viewing room was developed during Manik’s residency at the Monash University campus in Prato, Tuscany. During this period, he explored the legacy of ‘institutional painting’ through contemporary methods and queer frameworks, reflecting on the intersections of history, memory, and culture, and the dialogue between past and present. Over three months, Manik engaged deeply with the artistic, cultural, and historical landscape of Italy, accessing collections that originally informed formal painting conventions such as composition, surface, and oil techniques. These historical influences collapse into the layered, collaged imagery and research undertaken during the residency.
This body of work blurs the line between scientific accuracy and pure invention. Queerness – understood as a radical, fluid, and in-flux state – functions both as identity and methodology, opposing fixed norms and static structures. Manik foregrounds this continuous, dynamic, and destabilising nature as a source of critique and transformation, collapsing binaries within his compositions and giving agency to plasticity over stasis. The result is a more playful, open-ended mode of visual storytelling.
Through these paintings, Manik seeks to complicate and expand experiences of Othering, resisting its reductive labelling to something merely transgressive, edgy or provocative. The works dissolve traditional distinctions between Orientalist and neoclassical spaces – bathhouses, city squares, cathedrals – repopulating them with queer and POC bodies engaged in acts of reclamation, agency, and presence.
Works such as Oud (2025) and To Do Things in Secret Is a Great Pleasure (2025) draw from an Instagram account that posts AI-generated images fetishising queer Orientalist scenarios. While produced through vastly different technologies, this contemporary imagery perpetuates the same stereotypical and problematic representations of Eastern cultures found in 19th-century Orientalist paintings, originally justifying colonial agendas. The technical sophistication of these AI-generated images which evoke near-painterly surfaces, further recalls the tactile qualities of a painted artwork. Other works begin from similarly layered points of reference.
Wonder originates from a film still depicting the forgotten early years of Jesus, while Snake Charmer overlays a self-portrait of the artist onto a found stock image, referencing Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Orientalist painting The Snake Charmer (c.1879). Across the series, references from different eras and registers converge to generate new frameworks that challenge inherited modes of representation.
Photo by Andrea Tilli
Photo by Michelle Tran
Gian Manik
Gian Manik (b.1985) lives and works in Melbourne (AUS). He graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Monash University, Melbourne in 2012.
Selected solo exhibitions include Linden New Art, Melbourne, AUS (2026, forthcoming); ‘Imagine, you’re young and know what you want’, Conners Conners, Melbourne, AUS (2025); ‘Correspondence’, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, AUS (2025); ‘Regenerative Strategies’, Vessel Contemporary, Perth, AUS (2025); ‘You own the school, embrace your responsibility for its legacy’, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne, AUS (2025); ‘MINE’, Sumer, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, NZ (2024); ‘Ralph McLean’, Richmond Town Hall, Melbourne, AUS, (2023); ‘Marouflage’, Bus Projects, Melbourne, AUS, (2021).
Manik’s work has extensively been exhibited in group exhibitions in Australia and internationally at venues including Heide MoMA, Melbourne, AUS (2026, forthcoming); Ngununggla Art Gallery, Bowral NSW, AUS (2026, forthcoming); Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, NZ, (2026, forthcoming); Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, AUS (2025, 2023); Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, AUS (2025); Nonfrasa, Bali, Indonesia (2025); LAILA, Sydney, AUS (2025); Bayside Gallery, Melbourne, AUS (2024); Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, AUS (2023); Chauffeur, Sydney, AUS (2023); KINGS, Melbourne, AUS (2022) and more.
Manik is the recipient of the Juncture 2026 Art Prize. In 2025, Manik was an Artist in residence at the Monash University Prato Centre, Prato, IT. Between 2022 and 2024, he was a Studio Artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne AUS. In 2024, Manik was commissioned by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art for the 2024 PICA Editions. He was also a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize 2023, Art Gallery of South Australia.
Photo by Andrea Tilli